No Harry Potter in magical 'Horns' (w/video)

In “Horns,” Daniel Radcliffe grows a pair.

He plays a young man whose girlfriend was brutally murdered and who has a magically realistic way of becoming what his suburban Seattle neighbors think of him.

“When they looked at me, they saw the devil,” Ig Perrish (Radcliffe) narrates. “Now, I had to look the part.”

But Ig is sure he could never have killed his sweetheart since childhood, Merrin. And new horns or no new horns, he starts asking around, investigating the case that the cops never quite made against him, hunting for “the real killer.”

And once he’s got the reddish, Satanic outcroppings on his head, Ig has help in this hunt. People tend to blurt out deep, dark thoughts - truths, suspicions, yearnings. The doctor he goes to (Alex Zahara) to get the horns removed is distracted - by his nurse and other temptations.

“I think I should grind up some Oxycontin and have a little snort!”

Ig’s mother (Kathleen Quinlan) confesses that she wishes her son, whom she has professed to love “no matter what,” would just leave. His father (James Remar) makes a heartbreaking confession about what he thinks happened on that rainy night, when Ig got drunk and blacked out only to wake up with a dead girlfriend.

Director Alexandre Aja makes this film a sight-and-song gag-riddled religious allegory for much of its length. Ig drives an ancient AMC Gremlin, lumber trucks rumble through a “Twin Peaks” world of closeted cops and judgmental rednecks, all subject to whatever suggestion Ig utters at them to buy time for his investigation.

Radcliffe’s American accent is spot-on, his torment at Ig’s loss, fear that he might be guilty and fury that he might be framed are all nicely underplayed.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory.